sweetener

half of this album is produced by pharrell williams and it sounds like it: rhythms that land slightly wrong on purpose, arrangements with holes left in them, harmony stacks used as texture rather than sweetening. it is the least radio-shaped music she had released and it won the grammy for best pop vocal album anyway.

the other half, the max martin half, contains the actual singles, and the seam between the two is audible. that seam is the record's most interesting feature — it is a pop star being pulled between the song she knows how to write and the one she wants to make.

it is also a record explicitly about recovering from the previous year, and it declines to be triumphant about it. the sequencing keeps interrupting its own good mood, which is a more honest depiction of that process than a straightforwardly uplifting album would have been.